No, we aren’t rushing at all, in fact there’s just enough time to make your plans, order the material’s you need and get busy making up those special treats for the coming fall. What special treats? The special treats you are going to have made up and ready when football season tells you its time to start thinking about Christmas.
You are an artist and as such you think about your work and when it comes to selling you naturally think about the canvas, sculpture, pot, collage, photo or basket that you have been working on so long. And you should. That’s where the bulk of your income comes from. But are you missing out on peripheral sales?
Ya think George Lucas got all of that money and built all of those companies on the income from his movies? No, he has Skywalker Sound, THX theater sound, Skywalker Ranch post production facilities, Industrial Light and Magic and the Lucas Films Limited Game division. George Lucas never has to make another movie, the income from all of his companies makes more in a month than all of his films did in their first year and better still he controls the product. You want to see your work on a motel sign? No.
Think about Jimmy Buffet, the most laidback guy in music, his big hits are decades apart. So how did he hang on? He didn’t, he never had to, he was making money all along. He realized that half of the benefit of fame is in what it offers you. The Parrot Heads buy anything Jimmy cares to sell, Jimmy Buffet Hawaiian shirts, Jimmy Buffet Hush Puppies, Jimmy Buffet sandals and yes, Jimmy Buffet parrot head hats. He knew that merchandizing was the key.
You ever hear of Elvira: Mistress of the Dark? Cassandra Peterson puts on a fright wig and twenty pounds of elastic, stuffs herself into a half yard of Spandex and becomes the most successful marketer of all time, she’s the girl who owns Halloween. And in her spare time she makes protecting domestic animals her main ambition. And how does she do this, she doesn’t sing, she doesn’t dance, she doesn’t act, what is her secret? Calendars, personal appearances, cosmetics, costumes, candy, and every product known to man, and when the public finally tires of the joke or when she tires of all the training it takes to not quite fit into that cut-away dress, Ms Peterson will still have an income because of marketing.
I won’t compromise my art by putting it on placards, lunch boxes and taxi stands. And that’s a good thing, but a little marketing isn’t so bad either. Maybe a coffee mug with one of your pieces on it, we live in a tourist Mecca, it’s hard to transport a fifty by seventy canvas back to Tucumcari, but a coffee mug? Why do you think every business in the country has T-shirts? I’ll bet you Coors gets a lot more notice when it’s got two hundred T-shirts on girls at Spring Break. Too tacky
So don’t be tacky. You’re an artist make up a design with your own work which is eye-catching and tasteful. It can be done and who better than you to do it?
Too much trouble. Too much trouble to have something working for you all of the time? What sort of thinking is that? Guess you haven’t heard about residuals. Sure it’s sad to see The Dukes of Hazzard playing on forty channels, but do you think Tom Wopat, Catherine Bach and John Schneider care? They get paid every time it plays. And that is the secret, something which pays every time it is played.
I don’t have anything I’d be willing to use in that sort of shoddy, trashy business. I don’t know how to contact anyone who’d put it on a T-shirt or coffee mug and it would be too much trouble to set up the image.
Boy, you sure you’re an artist? With that kind of passion it’s a wonder that you get anything out of the studio.
Anything can serve as a design. Now you can’t believe everything in your studio is perfect, there must be something you could convert for commercial purposes? What about that still life you did to study light. It would make a wonderful tourist keepsake.
But you can’t put it on anything without preparing an image. Of course you took all my whining about making Giclees to heart and you have a print record of all of your works, right? No, well what are you waiting for? You have a digital camera. Com’on you do, you know you do and it takes pictures and you can take a picture of that piece you finally decided would work so why haven’t you?
I have but it isn’t ready for the screen.
But you did download Faststone Image Editor, like I told you. No, then do it now. It is the fastest, easiest, cheapest image editor around and no it isn’t as powerful as Photoshop or Elements but it’s free.
http://www.faststone.org/FSViewerDownload.htm
There I put in the link, again. Now you can edit the image
Yes, just like this one. Not a bad idea for a South Coast card, Thank You, note or holiday the image works, all it needs now is a place to get it produced.
Like Zazzle. I have no investments in Zazzle, now kickback coming; it’s a place I’ve used and found to be fast, cheap and high quality. Here follow the link and see for yourself.
http://www.zazzle.com/
Oh yeah you’ll notice there are a bunch of serious artists who think marketing makes sense. And yes, if you come up with a Jim Dandy idea you can put it to work right there. The returns aren’t as good as if you did all the grunt work yourself, but boy is it easy.
The Blackberry Festival is coming up. If you get on it today you could have something ready to test market and maybe start making a little income between commissions. And by Christmas or Thanksgiving or even Halloween, you could be ready to roll out the products and start pushing Elvira out of the market place.
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